“For you, you mean,” Harriet said. She is adamant about staying in this particular nursing home because the man she’s in love with is in the assisted-living place next door, and comes over to visit her nearly every day. Rebecca thinks it’s great that her mother has someone, though she could do without some of Harriet’s more candid reports. (“Ralph called me this morning and said, ‘I wish I could make love to you right now.’”)
“How is Ralph?” Rebecca asks now.
Harriet shrugs. “He thinks I’m mad at him because he didn’t give me a birthday present.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.” They laugh. They talk. Rebecca heats up some lamejuns in the kitchen microwave and makes Harriet a cup of tea. They hear the woman in the room next door say loudly, angrily, “Who washed my floor?” A low murmuring answer; then the angry woman again: “In the future I must ask that you not wash my floor without first giving me notice.”
Rebecca looks at Harriet. Harriet says, “That’s all she ever says, on and on, day and night, about the floor.”
Some lamejun has fallen onto the front of Harriet’s sweatshirt; when she finally notices and brushes it off, it leaves a spot. “Damn it.” She wipes furiously away at it, but in the midst of the fury is also grinning ruefully at Rebecca—Can you believe it? How does it happen every single time? She’s a very large woman, and she’s been dropping food on her shirt for as long as Rebecca can remember. The last time Rebecca visited, on the day Harriet moved to the nursing home, the aide swathed Harriet’s front in an enormous terrycloth bib before bringing in her dinner tray. Harriet allowed it, looking at Rebecca with a kind of stunned sadness; of all the enraging indignities of that day, this was the one that undid her. “She doesn’t need that,” Rebecca told the aide.
“We do it for everybody.”
“Right, but my mother doesn’t need it.”
So that was one small battle that Rebecca was there to win for Harriet. Without Rebecca, Harriet could have won it just fine for herself. Both of them knew this—and yet, between them, love has always had to be proved. It is there; and it gets proved, over and over. Some of their worst fights, confusingly, seem to both prove and disprove it: two people who didn’t love each other couldn’t fight like that—certainly not repeatedly. Still, Rebecca has often wished for something quieter with Harriet. Are there mothers and daughters who can be happy together without saying much?
“You know,” Harriet says now, frowning, clearly resuming an argument she’s been conducting in her own head, “you jump on me about watching the news all the time, but it’s not because I’m just some morbid tragedy hound, it’s—”
“I know why it is,” Rebecca says.
Rebecca’s younger sister, Cath, disapproves of the relationship between Rebecca and Harriet. She thinks it’s unhealthily close. She says she is tired of giving Harriet inches and having her take miles. (Rebecca, who has never seen Cath give Harriet an inch, finds this declaration both funny and infuriating.) Cath is a sculptor who lives in Denver. She thinks Harriet is a monster. She thinks—and here Rebecca agrees with her—that their father, a quiet, scholarly, self-deprecating man who drank, had ended up drinking more and walling himself up more and dying lonely because Harriet took up so much room. Harriet always had another man, single, recently divorced, or widowed. “She had affairs,” Cath said. “She broke Daddy’s heart.”
“You think those were affairs?” Rebecca asked, remembering all those wistful, mostly handsome, young men who had always seemed to her to be intruding—What were they doing at the Thanksgiving table? Why were they hanging around on Christmas Eve?—eagerly passing the cranberry sauce and trying brightly and unsuccessfully to engage her father in conversation.
“Not consummated affairs,” Cath said, with exasperated authority. “Mom was never brave enough, or radical enough, to actually sleep with anyone else. Those affairs were all about noble renunciation of actual sex. They were all about deprivation and suffering.”
She has said, more recently, to Rebecca over the phone: “She’s going to live to be a hundred, you know. People like that, who only care about themselves, live forever, because every ounce of energy they have goes into preserving the organism.”
Rebecca and her mother had begun to get close only when, nearly fifteen years ago, Harriet seemed to be dying.
She was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer just when the revelations broke about the rotten marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Rebecca was going through her own fierce divorce at the time (it had started amicably, with a mediator, and then escalated to the point where the lawyers’ bills had become so horrifying, so disproportionate to whatever it was that she and Steve had been fighting over, that the two of them had met for a drink one night and agreed to do everything the mediator had suggested in the first place).
But when Harriet got sick, Rebecca picked up the phone and called her soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law, who was on the board of a famous cancer hospital. She believed that Steve’s father, who had never liked her much and never done much to conceal it, was nonetheless fundamentally ethical and would do what he could to help. (Another belief, both bitter and accurate, was that he liked to remind himself of his own power by pulling strings and making things happen.) He got Harriet admitted to the hospital, and the surgeon who was supposed to be brilliant lived up to his billing.
The doctor came and spoke to Rebecca after Harriet’s surgery, which took an entire day. “I got it all,” he said, and went on to list all the places where he’d found it: pretty much everywhere, as far as Rebecca could tell.
“So what’s her prognosis?” Rebecca made herself ask, though she felt she already knew.
The surgeon looked seriously at her. “I have no idea,” he said.
Rebecca wanted to hug him for that, and would have hugged Steve’s father, if he had been there. She did hug Steve, who had showed up unexpectedly at the hospital and sat in the waiting room with her all day. They had spent most of the time hunched over a book of Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles; they screwed up each one irreparably, in ink, and then they would make a big blue X on it before moving on to the next one.
During that day, and right afterward, Rebecca thought that maybe the divorce was a mistake, and that she and Steve would get back together. But it turned out to be like the illness of Anna Karenina: a kind of temporary exalted goodwill, a glimpse of how lovely things might have been if everybody hadn’t felt the way they actually did feel.
She went out and bought People magazine, and a copy of Diana: Her True Story. Every day she read to Harriet, who lay in bed with tubes coming out of her nose, and puffy boots automatically inflating and deflating around her legs at intervals, to prevent blood clots. “She tried to kill herself with a lemon slicer?” Harriet said. “What’s a lemon slicer? Do they mean a peeler? She tried to peel herself to death?” The two of them sat there in the dark hospital room, laughing. Whenever the surgeon came in, Rebecca hid the book and the magazine in the nightstand, because Harriet didn’t want him to think she was the kind of woman who read trash.
Harriet would later say of that time, “It was a nightmare.” Rebecca, who, partly in reaction to her mother’s hyperbolic way of putting things, tends toward understatement, would say, “It was tough.” But while it was going on, it was, in some bizarre way, also wonderful. They liked being together, for the first time in years. One afternoon, a couple of days after the surgery, Harriet needed a blood transfusion. The drip was still running when someone, mistakenly, brought in a dinner tray. Harriet was not allowed to have anything by mouth, and so Rebecca told the aide: “We don’t need that.”